seeking the nexus of truth and beauty

Category: Videos

Here’s another one. Yes. It’s really got a French title. Please don’t ask me to pronounce it as I would butcher the language.

This is an older film I’ve just finished. It was shot in the summer of 2011 and conceived a year or two before that. Having shot the entire thing, I decided the best course of action was to sit on the footage and not do anything with it for over a year.

No. Not really.

Several things held this up. Probably the biggest was a lack of urgency. Then I decided to do some effects work on it. That proved time consuming and soul-crushingly monotonous.

In the interest of building intrigue, I am not going to say much more about the film at this time. I will have a follow-up post soon which will give a more in depth explanation of its creation, original intent, and how I think it turned out by contrast.

If you happen to know the individuals in this film you will probably find it humorous. If, like most people on Earth, you do not, then you will probably be bored and I can’t really blame you. At least it’s pretty, I hope. (And weird. It’s really weird.)

If you do find the imagery beautiful to any degree, don’t credit me. God is the best lighting technician and set dresser.

Yes, that’s right. The title of this post is, in fact, “Slap Me with a Wet Fish.” That is also the name of a film I made last semester with two classmates. It was our first project in the excellent class Cinematography and Lighting and my only experience shooting on actual film.

My major was “Digital Cinema Arts” which is basically a pseudo-film degree. I say “pseudo” because we didn’t actually use old-fashioned physical film and because most people think you have to go to California to get a film degree.

Having never shot on real film before, this project was quite an interesting little challenge. There was no LCD viewfinder. No deleting or ignoring bad takes. No instant playback of our footage. And no helpful displays of any kind. It was just a plain old box with film inside and a lens on the front.

We had a single 100 foot reel of 16mm film which equated to approximately 3 minutes of footage at the standard 24 frames per second. We had no ability to edit our footage so each shot had to be done in one take and in sequential order. There was no sound recording either which is a shame because I feel like it could really do with some old-timey music.

The footage looks kind of like it was recorded from an old VCR (that’s what we used before DVDs players and DVRs, kids) for two reasons. For one, this was shot on an old Russian camera which is the source of the flashes and the jittering. Secondly, it has undergone transference from film to digital which is never a good thing for quality.

In the words of Tom Ostertag who graciously took it upon himself to convert the footage of everyone in class, “The color, resolution, and dynamic range suck compared to the real thing” so keep that in mind when watching. Even though the transfer is less-than-ideal, these wouldn’t see the light of day at all without his hard work. Thanks, Tom!

Like all projects I did in school, this one began with a great idea. Oh, no wait. I mean it began with the complete and utter absence of ideas.

Actually, that’s less true of this project than most. My original idea was to shoot a chase sequence of some kind but given our limitations I think it’s probably good we didn’t attempt that although one could say we sort of ended up with a slow, creepy chase scene of sorts.

My other idea was the “crosshair” shot. Ever since I saw the banisters in the theater building at Lindenwood I wanted to shoot something like that. They always looked like crosshairs to me but that’s probably because I’ve played too many shooter games. Since we were in the theater building for this project and it fit the story we were doing, I suggested we try the shot. I wasn’t sure it would work but I think it did fairly well.

I’m also quite fond of the first shot where we see the stalker’s face. It’s good old-fashioned monster lighting. Reminds me of Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster.

We came up with the title by using some sort of random dialog generator online. The generator, of course, spit out total nonsense. The phrase “Slap me with a wet fish” stuck out to us. Marie, the female lead, couldn’t stop laughing about it the whole time. I think it’s wet part that does it. Imploring someone to slap you with a dry fish just wouldn’t be as funny.

We used Tom’s Macbook to shoot intertitles. We basically wrote the dialog at random as we came to it. We didn’t really know why Tom was displeased or why he was stalking Marie until we shot the end.

It’s been a busy week. Work, paperwork, more work. Yeah. I haven’t really had time to do as much writing as I would like so you get this instead of one of the other posts I’m working on.

Enjoy the new trailer for Steven Spielberg’s latest film Lincoln. Or don’t. You could hate it too. Tell me if you do, I’d be curious.

I am indifferent, personally. I was quite excited about this movie and now I’m merely interested. The trailer’s a little too… feelgood for me. I tend to hate trailers for being silly oversimplifications of the movie or giving too much away or just being terribly cliched. I’m hoping this one is an oversimplified representation of a complex story and character.

Abraham Lincoln is a controversial figure. Maybe not in the general public, but with people who’ve done deeper research he’s either very well liked or despised, at least from what I’ve seen. History majors, poly sci people, or those otherwise obsessed with the Civil War period tend to have pretty strong opinions on the man. Some are of the opinion that Lincoln was more of a pragmatist than a great crusader. Ending slavery was politically expedient so he did it. Others believe he did it of a deep moral conviction. This trailer seems to lean heavily toward the latter depiction of the man.

I don’t know. I expect the truth is somewhere in between. One thing all historians agree on: Lincoln did not hunt vampires.

Well hopefully it’ll be good. It does have top notch production value and a slew of great actors. So that’s promising. And Spielberg’s done some great historical films in the past like Schindler’s List and my favorite war movie ever, Saving Private Ryan. I guess I’ll be cautiously optimistic for this to be really good.

What else is there to get excited about this year? The Hobbit? Pff. I was starting to get excited about that but then Peter Jackson had to go and make it a trilogy. Now I almost don’t care. I’m sure my tune will change closer to release. I have to stop myself now before I rant about that.

As a funny aside: I started typing “Lincoln vs.” into Google. The first three autocomplete suggestions were “zombies,” “Cadillac,” and “vampires.” The fourth suggestion was “Lincoln vs. Douglas.” Oh the times we live in.